Lorraine Melgosa offers her services to carry the bodies of those killed at war to their graves. Families say her horsedrawn hearse adds beauty and elegance to the services and imparts a feeling of peace before the soldiers are buried.

The body of Army Staff Sgt. Justin Vasquez is carried to Mountainview Cemetery at Manzanola in June. Vasquez had been impressed by the horse-drawn hearse years ago.

Manzanola – It’s impossible for Lorraine Melgosa not to cry these days. Taking dead heroes to their graves will do that to you.

Her life was simpler before the warriors came home in the bottoms of planes and were sent to their graves much too soon. It was simpler before she volunteered to carry those men in her horse-drawn hearse, giving them one final dignified moment.

It was certainly simpler, Melgosa said, before she realized that her nephew, a soldier serving in Iraq, could become one of them.

“I lose a little piece of my heart with each (funeral),” Melgosa, a divorced mother of two, said of her newfound work. “Sometimes I feel so selfish for being here and having them gone.”

There have been four services so far. Four flags, four 21-gun salutes, four grieving families. They stand out among the 500 or so other funerals she has worked over the years.

Melgosa first offered her carriage to the family of Army Staff Sgt. Justin Vasquez, whom she saw grow up in this no-stoplight town in southeastern Colorado – a young man who died in June in Iraq, leaving a family and a small Arkansas Valley town to mourn him.

The 41-year-old wanted to make the calls offering her services, even though she dreaded hearing the sorrow of families that had lost their sons or husbands to war.

Taking a sliver of another mother’s pain might brighten a solemn day, she said, even if it meant darkening her own.

“There are no words to describe her,” said Cindy Maynard, whose 19-year-old son, Marine Lance Cpl. Chad Maynard, was anticipating fatherhood for the first time when an explosive detonated under his vehicle last summer in Iraq. “No one in the world is like Lorraine.”

A true honor

It’s a job that makes her rise at 2 in the morning to load her 18-year-old horse, Mike, and hearse into a trailer.

There are no ribbons on the horse, just clean, grayed fur and a few whiskers sticking from the gelding’s nose. Melgosa wears a tailcoat and lets her hair hang down the sides of her high cheekbones.

To those families she has served, Melgosa’s 138-year-old carriage – with its glass sides, black, pillowed cloth and wood-carved draperies – evoked memories of President Kennedy’s coffin being wheeled down the streets of Washington, D.C., to his resting place in Arlington National Cemetery.

Melgosa made sure the soldiers’ funerals were equally beautiful. The visions remain trapped in her mind.

“I make it to the highway home,” she said of her drives back to Manzanola, “and I start to tear up. I’m full-out crying a few minutes later.”

Maybe it was Vasquez’s funeral that brought the tears, when his mother said she could never find a way to repay Melgosa.

Or maybe it was the poem she gave Marine Lance Cpl. Jeremy Tamburello’s family last month, the one that talks about pride and courage and grace and how their 19-year-old son had it all.

Or maybe it was the ride to the grave with Cynthia Dietz, a woman too weak to walk behind the wooden carriage holding the body of her son Danny, an elite Navy SEAL who was ambushed in Afghanistan last summer.

During that ride, Melgosa talked of her nephew, Bobby, how he was an Army mechanic and how she now had a deeper understanding of the young man’s life and those of others like him.

“Danny never wanted us to cry,” Dietz told Melgosa.

“I think he’d understand if you cried now,” Melgosa said.

Dietz reached into her purse and produced a silver coin inscribed with her son’s name and “1980-2005.”

She gave it to her son’s carriage driver.

“I had those specially made,” Dietz said. “I don’t give those out to just anyone.”

Job of a lifetime

The business was bound to fail.

But Melgosa did it anyway, bought that Percheron horse and hearse more than a decade ago. Barney, her brother, thought people would clamor for their funeral service.

They named it Wellington Carriage Co., after their dead father. Work was scarce and paid little. Barney left within a year, but his sister stuck with it.

“It had Dad’s name on it,” Melgosa said. “I couldn’t let it fail.”

She has done more than 500 funerals since, making just enough money to feed and care for her horses, especially Mike, the one everyone loves.

“When Justin died and we got the call offering the carriage, I immediately asked for Mike,” said Bosley, whose brother-in-law was killed in a car accident in 1993 and became Melgosa’s first funeral.

“Justin was sad, but he thought it was so neat,” Bosley said of that first funeral. “He was in awe of it, and that’s what I wanted for him.”

Mike was retired, though. He had pulled a ligament in a hind leg two years earlier and never fully recovered.

“I didn’t think he’d make it. I was afraid he could drop right there,” Melgosa said.

Still, she harnessed her horse a few days before Vasquez’s funeral and pulled a wagon’s long, rigid arms to his body.

“Off he went,” she said. “Real steady. It was like he knew this was important to the town.”

So on a June day, the horse lumbered along the road from the high school and 1,000 people followed him to the grave.

“It was like (the hearse) kept Justin on earth a little longer,” Vasquez’s mother said.

Perhaps that’s why Melgosa’s gift still is so special to the families.

“Those people at the chapel all got in line behind it, and we walked, and in some way a peace – a calmness – came over me,” Maynard said. “It was beautiful; it was elegant; it was regal.

“Chad would have thought it was so cool.”

“A little hope”

In a land where train tracks run beyond the horizon to the earth’s edge, Melgosa is just another simple country woman struggling to raise her children and make ends meet.

Melgosa works the funeral job and for a cellphone business in nearby La Junta and tends to her 35-acre farm – running a tractor over the stubbly alfalfa field. “Man’s work,” as she calls it, proudly holding out her cracked hands.

Her home is spartan, with whitewashed barn wood tacked around doorways and hanging in patterns on a corner wall. A nearby room is a shrine to her son and daughter, with cheerleading outfits and baseball jerseys pinned to the wall and ceiling.

Outside, horses eat in their corrals while a dog chases passing vehicles on the dirt road.

It’s these times that she thinks about Bobby, what he’s doing, when he’s coming home.

Bobby Leeper always loved his aunt. But something changed after those funerals, the member of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment said in an e-mail from the Middle East.

He admitted he can’t describe the bond they share. “I’m proud of her,” he finally pecked out.

So is the rest of the town.

“She’s given everyone a little hope,” said Sandy Williams, Melgosa’s friend of 20 years.

The afterlife

When you deal with so much death, you can’t help but ask yourself about heaven.

Melgosa is still trying to figure it all out. She hopes the boys she helped bury have found it.

But her heaven is not a place.

“For me, it’s when someone mentions my name in town and they smile,” she said. “Like I’ve done some good in my life for someone else.

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